Final update on the JetBrains Toolbox announcement. Open letter by Maxim Shafirov,
JetBrains CEO

A brand new free-of-charge .NET decompiler from JetBrains brings intelligent
navigation and code insight features to the entire .NET developer community

September 18, 2015

Hello,

tl;dr

We are moving forward with subscriptions with important adjustments.

You will receive a perpetual fallback license once you pay for a year up front or 12
consecutive
months.

You will receive up to 40% discount for continuous subscription.

You will be able to use the software without an Internet connection.

Current customers with active or recently expired upgrade subscription get first two
years of
subscription for the price of one.

We still recommend you take 10 minutes to read it all for the complete details.

On September 3rd we announced JetBrains Toolbox – our new developer productivity tools
line licensing – to
replace the current scheme. The announcement was made after our research, which included
surveys with
different categories of customers, indicated that it was the right move. The discussions
and feedback that
we received after the announcement went public showed that we had failed to properly
account for all
considerable groups of our customers and articulate our reasoning for the move in the
announcement message.

We sincerely apologize for this.

Among the direct and often negative feedback, there were concerns raised by our
passionate users. There was
of course also support for the idea. We’re very grateful to all of you.

Along with explaining the new model and the adjustments we’ve made based on the feedback,
we’ll also provide
you with our reasons for the move and address some other concerns raised.

Moving forward with subscriptions

As announced earlier, starting November 2, 2015, you will be able to buy any of the
products included under
the JetBrains Toolbox on a monthly or annual plan, including the option to All Products
which gives access
to all the desktop developer tools.

Perpetual Fallback License

The monthly or annual payment is a subscription fee; however, when purchasing an annual
subscription you will
immediately get a perpetual fallback license for the exact version available at the
time. This license will
allow you to use that exact version of the software should you decide not to continue
with the subscription
after the year is up. If paying on a monthly basis, as soon as you pay for 12
consecutive months, you will
also receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact
version of when your 12
consecutive months subscription started. You will receive perpetual fallback licenses
for every version
you’ve paid 12 consecutive months for in a rolling fashion.

This option is available whether you subscribe to a single product or the ‘All Products’
option.

Continuity Discount

For customers that continue to renew their subscription without interruption, we will be
offering continuity
discounts of 20% after the first 12 months and 40% after the first 24 months. While
subscriptions remain
active, they will continue to receive these discounts.
Please note some prices were changed compared to the initial Toolbox announcement.

Licensing and Activation

The easiest and most convenient way to manage subscriptions is to sign in with JetBrains
Account, which has
been in use by over 16,000 organizations and over 260,000 students for over a year
already.

If you’re paying on an annual basis, the software will attempt to check the subscription
status and ensure
that the account credentials are up to date on a regular basis (in case you decide to
change these for
instance). The only time the software will graciously provide a warning is if the past
due date of the
subscription has occurred.

If required, you will also have the option to use a license key instead of JetBrains
Account. However, these
keys will need to be updated manually after a subscription is renewed.

If you’re paying on a monthly basis, the software will need to perform checks to validate
the license using
JetBrains Account. If it cannot connect to the Internet for MORE THAN 30 days, it will
show you a message
and provide a grace time for connection.

Organizations without Internet Access

If your organization does not allow an Internet connection, you will still be able to use
a local license
server or an offline license key.

Existing Customers

To address the transition of existing customers to the new model, we will be giving
everyone with an active
upgrade subscription or a subscription that expired less than a year ago, two years of
subscription for the
price of one year, and at 40% off standard annual price. Starting with the third year,
the 40% discount
stays on the yearly subscription plan.
If you do not have an upgrade subscription for your licenses or your subscription has
long expired, you’re
still qualified for 40% discount for annual payments provided you redeem this offer no
later than January 1,
2017.

Reasons for our move to subscriptions and concerns raised

Why we are moving to subscriptions

Our current model is based on a largely accepted industry standard for downloadable
software – pay a higher
entry cost and then pay for upgrades.

For the past several years, we’ve been breaking away from annual release cycles, often
releasing up to two or
three major and minor releases per year. This is both a result of market demand as well
as our own desire to
make our work available sooner rather than later. Some of this work leads to features
that make it to a
What’s New page, while many under the hood improvements don’t, despite being important
and necessary. And
software, especially developer tools, need continuous innovation and support, whether
it’s downloadable or
in the cloud.

Our successful growth in terms of new customers has allowed us to move in this direction.
However, we realize
that unless we change our business model, this won’t be sustainable in the long run,
because our user base
cannot grow indefinitely. We invest our efforts into delivering a great experience to
all our customers,
both new and existing, and we want these efforts to be the driver of our revenues.
We believe such a
model is more sustainable in the long run and will allow us to continue making great
tools for
you.

Providing flexibility in usage of tools, the ability to pay monthly, or offering an
affordable model for all
our tools are great side-effects of this move, because subscriptions will enable these,
but they are not the
main reasons. Should we have told you this to begin with? Yes.

Having a simple and sustainable model was and continues to be our goal.

Concerns raised in regard to the move to subscriptions

Losing access to tools paid for

“This is downloadable software and I’ve paid for it. Now I’ll lose access to it if I
don’t pay or
JetBrains goes out of business”

This is the most controversial topic. We didn’t realize how many users would
differentiate subscription based
services such as cloud hosting, monitoring tools, communication tools or repository
services from an IDE,
despite some of these also having downloadable versions. We expected a lower entry cost
and flexibility
would outweigh the perpetuity. We believe though that now offering perpetual fallback
licenses, which was
also suggested by many who provided feedback, will address this concern.

A price increase in disguise

The move to subscriptions has brought some price changes which affected new licenses to
WebStorm as well as
several commercial items.

First and foremost, the subscription move is not about a price increase in disguise. It
would have been much
easier to just merely announce that, especially given that we’ve not had any significant
change in prices
for nearly 5 years. Our existing prices are available as are the new ones, and you will
see that depending
on the product and years of subscriptions some work out favorable to you as a customer,
and some might not.
Overall we’ve tried to provide prices that we believe are fair and sustainable.

Continuously raising prices

“JetBrains will continue to raise prices and force people to pay to continue to use
the tools”

While we may raise (or lower) prices now and then, it has never been nor is it now our
intention to do this
continuously. Some commenters argued that we’d be taking them hostage by eliminating the
perpetual license,
and will use this to squeeze higher and higher subscription rates every time. Once
again, that is not and
never has been our intention. Nonetheless, we hope the perpetual fallback license
removes any doubts people
may have had.

Ceasing in providing value

“Putting people on subscriptions is just a way to force people to pay without
providing new value”

Much like the previous case, if we do not provide value, people will not continue to use
our products. For
over 15 years we have provided what we believe are very competitive prices for our tools
and the value they
provide, and we will continue to do that. We are not exempt from the laws of the market.
If we don’t provide
value for what we charge, we won’t be able to sell, no matter how much someone might
depend on us. Once
again, we feel perpetual fallback licenses will mitigate the risk if it were to be the
case.

Dealing with budget freezes

“We have mid-year budget freezes and would be left without the ability to use the
tool”

We know based on feedback from customers that having a flexible model during a fiscal
year does provide
benefits. At the same, time we also understand that certain projects might have
unannounced budget freezes
and that this model might not be entirely suitable for them. We hope that the option to
buy an annual
subscription which provides a guaranteed perpetual version can alleviate these cases
somehow.

Giving you the choice

“I upgrade every year and I want to continue to do so, but let it be my choice”

We hope that with these adjustments, the choice of when and if to upgrade is now in your
hands.

In closing

From the very beginning at JetBrains we’ve focused on the things we’re passionate about,
which is providing
developers with efficient tooling and allowing them to focus on the really important
things. This holds true
today and will always do so.

We are still a company of developers creating tools for developers.

Thank you.

Maxim Shafirov

About JetBrains

JetBrains is a technology-leading software development firm specializing in the creation
of intelligent,
productivity-enhancing software. It maintains its headquarters in Prague, Czech
Republic, with its R&D labs
located in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Munich and Boston. JetBrains employs close to 600
people and is
organically grown, with no external funding. Its product catalogue includes
award-winning tools such as
IntelliJ IDEA and ReSharper, and its IntelliJ Platform has been chosen by variety of
companies to build
their own tooling on, including Google's Android Studio. For more information,
see www.jetbrains.com.